Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Pragmatic exploitation of cities and their dwellers may be an ineradicable disease that drives the squalor and eventual decline of urban agglommerations, but those who take on diagnosis of the seemingly incurable become saviors if successful. There have been only a handful of modern-era thinkers with the knowledge, insight and creativity on what's wrong with the design of cities and what might be done to make it better, Viollet le Duc, Lewis Mumford, Kevin Lynch among them. It is an unexpected pleasure to encounter a new deep thinker standing on these giants' shoulders in Grahame Shane's magisterial "Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory." The volume is comprehensive on urbanism, historically and intellectually, and will amply reward the student, scholar and professional who reads it in parts or most beneficially, in whole -- more than once. Prepare to be highly educated by this book, not merely advised what to do to get or keep a job or get a project funded by public taxation. If read and comprehended by urban policy makers it will contribute to their escape from real estate development hell, or if not that, it will arm honorable officials against the weasels who want to claim cities as their own profitmaking playpens. Shane wonderfully reminds what it is like to learn from a deeply thoughtful scholar offering open wisdom compared to a city-exploiter pitching secret schemes. Still, one might imagine land developers and good buddy officials searching Shane's compendium for nuggets to use in their next snake oil presentation to suspicious citizen groups rightfully fed up with unceasing demands for bailouts.
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Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City TheoryThis book provides a simple but comprehensive framework for the emerging academic discipline of urban design, from its origins in Europe and America, to contemporary issues of imagery, finance and marketing in an age of globalisation
There is currently no contemporary textbook for urban design that includes a general history and theory of the subject.
Internationally, urban design is more and more becoming a core subject taught in architecture schools. The AIA (US) and the RIBA (UK) both require undergraduates and graduates to study the urban dimension of architectural design. On a wider scale, in Europe, the EU is developing a common architectural curriculum, which includes an urban component for under-graduates. The situation is similar in schools across Asia and Australia.
Aimed at both students and teachers, this book provides a simple and accessible framework, from the origins of urban design and the main techniques developed to deal with the design of fragments of cities, to participatory planning processes, codes, imagery, finance and marketing. Finally, it proposes an innovative vision of contemporary practice based on the work of leading actors and projects in the field.
This book is set to become the key textbook at undergraduate and graduate levels
It is written in an accessible and direct tone, and highly illustrated with many colour and black and white diagrams
It includes a general history and theory of urban design and provides an up-to-date account of contemporary urban conditions
Praise for Recombinant Urbanism:
"Documents a major intellectual advance…eagerly awaited by academics and practitioners all around the world… should become a standard text for schools of architecture and urbanism." Leon Van Schaik, Innovation Professor of Architecture, RMIT, Australia
" …both unique and instrumentally positive. The book is the result of many years of research and writing, and is a small masterpiece in urban studies. It has already proved its worth in the teaching of urban studies, at Columbia, the AA, the Bartlett School, and Cooper Union, to mention only a few of the universities where Dr Shane has had a powerful influence...It is, indeed, one of the very best manuscripts I have read in the field in the last few years." Anthony Vidler, Professor and Dean, Irwin S Chanin School of Architecture, Cooper Union, New York, USA
"I can say without hesitation that I fully endorse Grahame's work…the issues it covers are highly topical and such a book would indeed be widely read by architecture students, urban designers and planners." Colin Fournier, Professor of Architecture &Urbanism, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, UK
"Of great necessity for undergraduate and postgraduate students, scientists and professionals in urban planning and design [This] publication will certainly inspire work with city models in a wide range of practice." Henrik W Jensen, Associate Professor in Town Planning, Aarhus School of Architecture, The Netherlands
"A very important book. Shane … has made legible and sensible the reams of recent urban discourse for a general college reader. Because of this labor-intensive effort, this book will be accessible by undergrad architecture programs as well as graduate seminars in urban design and planning. Additionally there is a big interest in UD and UP theory in ecology and social science now, and because of Grahame's generous writing style the book will cross over to these other disciplines. … I can also speak to the international interest in this book; … again Shane has made important urban theories and thinking more widely available to an international student audience. … The legacy the book will have (will be in) convincing people that the design of cities matters, not in the overbearing and over-controlling sense of new urbanism, but in reinforcing the multiple possibilities of contemporary life. Brian McGrath, Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Columbia University, USA
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